Nicolas Poussin

French painter

• Born: June 1, 1594
• Birthplace: Villers, near Les Andelys, Normandy, France
• Died: November 19, 1665
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Poussin was among the greatest French painters of the seventeenth century and one of the most influential artists of the Baroque era. His work reflects those qualities of rationality and high moral purpose that were so admired by the French classicists, and it profoundly influenced the subsequent development of painting, both in Rome, where he spent most of his life, and in France.

Early Life

What little is known of the circumstances of the birth of Nicolas Poussin (puh-sahn), and of his early life, depends almost entirely on the accounts published by his seventeenth century biographers. He was born in 1594, in a hamlet not far from the Norman town of Les Andelys. His father, Jean Poussin, may have originally been a member of the minor nobility, but, after fighting in the Wars of Religion, he went to Normandy, where he supported himself by working the land. His mother was Marie Delaisement, the daughter of a municipal magistrate and the widow of an attorney.

Nothing is known about Poussin’s early education. He may have had some instruction in Latin, but he is said to have neglected his studies to devote more time to drawing. In 1612, a mediocre painter named Quentin Varin arrived in Les Andelys, where he executed a number of paintings, some of which are still in place. He is said to have encouraged the young Poussin to try to convince his parents to let him follow an artistic career; when they opposed his plans, Poussin left home. He was eighteen years old.

He went first to Rouen and then to Paris. His activities for the twelve or so years between his arrival in Paris in 1612 or 1613 and his departure for Rome in late 1623 cannot be determined with any certainty, but by the time he left Paris he had acquired some measure of success as an artist, working for the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, as well as the archbishop of Paris. He had access to the royal collections, where he had a chance to study the incomparable examples of antique sculpture and Italian Renaissance paintings, from which he drew far more inspiration than he did from the work of his contemporaries.

Poussin also became friendly with the Italian poet Giambattista Marini, who became his patron and for whom he executed a series of drawings illustrating the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses (before 8 c.e.). Poussin’s goal during those years was to go to Rome, the acknowledged center of the arts, and he made several attempts to reach the city. On one occasion he got as far as Florence before being forced to return to France. A second attempt got him no farther than Lyons. On his third attempt, he finally succeeded, and in March of 1624 he arrived in Rome.

Life’s Work

Except for a brief trip to Paris in 1640-1642, Poussin remained in Rome for the rest of his life. He was thirty years old when he arrived, and although he was almost immediately introduced to important patrons, very few commissions came his way. He spent some time working in the studio of the Bolognese painter Domenico Zampieri, known as Il Domenichino, who was one of the leading classicist painters, but it was not until 1628 that he was given a chance to produce a major altarpiece for an important church. This was an enviable opportunity, for the painting of large-scale altar pictures was the stock-in-trade of Roman artists and the surest way to achieve success and recognition. The painting, Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus , was intended for an altar in the church of St. Peter’s. Unfortunately, it was not well received. A year or two later, Poussin became very ill, and his illness, coupled with the unpopularity of his Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, seems to have brought on an emotional crisis. He realized that his talents lay elsewhere, and he gave up the attempt to compete with the Roman artists by creating altarpieces or large frescoes. The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus was the only large, public commission he ever completed in Rome.

For the next ten years, Poussin worked almost exclusively for a rather select group of Roman clients who shared his consuming interest in Roman antiquity. He was a friend of Cassiano del Pozzo, the secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and a man whose great interest was the formation of a collection of drawings recording all aspects of Roman antiquity. Poussin was closely associated with Pozzo in this project, and his paintings of the early 1630’s reflect the strong antiquarian interests of Pozzo’s circle.

By the middle of the decade, Poussin had begun to create the works that are among his greatest contributions to Western art. The Adoration of the Golden Calf exemplifies these new developments in style and subject matter. The theme is of epic stature, the composition carefully controlled and rigorously organized. Furthermore, Poussin tried to reveal the emotions of the protagonists in his painted drama through their gestures and facial expressions. This rigorously intellectual approach to pictorial problems was henceforth to be one of the major characteristics of his work. At the end of the decade, he painted some of his finest religious works, among them the paintings representing the Seven Sacraments which were commissioned from him by Pozzo.

Poussin was much admired in France, and in 1636, Cardinal de Richelieu commissioned him to execute a series of Bacchanals for the cardinal’s château near Orléans. The cardinal and Louis XIV wanted Poussin to return to France, and he finally agreed. In 1640, he left Rome and went to Paris, but the trip was not a success. He was commissioned to execute several paintings and to plan the decoration of part of the Louvre Palace, but none of the commissions was really suited to his talents and the results were disappointing. Poussin was back in Rome by September of 1642, and the principal result of his trip was that it allowed him to make contact with a number of men who were to become his most important clients during the later part of his life. Most of them were well-educated, middle-class bankers, merchants, and civil servants to whom the seriousness and moral earnestness of Poussin’s work had a great appeal. It was for this group that Poussin executed the paintings that are considered to be among the finest examples of French classicism. One of Poussin’s most important clients was a civil servant named Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who took care of Poussin while he was in Paris and with whom the artist conducted an extensive correspondence when he returned to Rome. It was for Chantelou that Poussin painted his famous Self-Portrait , which is now in the Louvre.

In 1644, Poussin began working on a set of paintings illustrating the Seven Sacraments for Chantelou, who had wanted Poussin to make copies of the paintings of the same subject that he had executed earlier for Pozzo. Poussin refused, and the paintings are quite different, revealing Poussin’s deepening sense of the tragic in the severity of their composition. The strange and haunting allegory of The Arcadian Shepherds of about 1650 is even more moving, as the shepherds remain motionless to hear the message on the sepulchral monument deciphered for them: Even in Arcadia, there is death.

In the late 1640’s, Poussin began painting what are in effect pure landscapes. The Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion is based on an incident in the ancient Greek historian Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (105-115), in which the widow of the general whom the Athenians have put to death is allowed to gather up his ashes. It is the lucid arrangement of the landscape, however, that is the principal expressive element. The principles of organization that he had applied to figural compositions he now used to create an image of an ordered and harmonious nature. It is a vision of the natural world in perfect harmony with human concepts of rational order.

The final years of Poussin’s life were marred by illness, and he seems to have isolated himself from the art world, seeing only a few friends and devoting himself to his painting. His late paintings, such as the Four Seasons in the Louvre, are some of his most personal creations, works in which the formal elements of art—light and shadow, color and texture—often seem to be his real subject. Finally, after a long decline, Poussin died in Rome on November 19, 1665.

Significance

Nicolas Poussin has often been called the Painter-Philosopher. While it is certainly true that in his paintings he tried to give expression to his ethical concepts and religious views, he was certainly not unique in this respect. What is so unusual about Poussin’s work is that he was able to evolve a language of artistic forms through which these ideas could be expressed with great clarity. Unlike most seventeenth century artists, he was deeply interested in philosophical concepts, particularly the writings of the Stoic philosophers of antiquity, whose ideal of indifference to feelings or emotion he found particularly appealing and from whom he seems to have learned to interpret classical myths as allegories of eternal truth. His subjects from classical history are often those in which the heroes achieve a moral victory through self-sacrifice, and there are numerous parallels between Poussin’s paintings and the work of the French seventeenth century playwright Pierre Corneille. Both try to concentrate the action and eliminate any elements that might distract the spectator from the moral lesson. Both favor the rigidly conventional expression of human emotions and work within a self-imposed set of rigidly conventional forms. Their works form the cornerstones of French seventeenth century classicism.

Poussin has always been considered a master of classical composition, above all in nineteenth century France, where he was equally admired by the classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the postimpressionist Edgar Degas. Paul Cézanne was also greatly influenced by him and tried to fuse the intensity and clarity of the color of the French Impressionists with the formal order of Poussin. Even the early cubist painters have acknowledged their debt to Poussin, and to artists for whom the expressive implications of pictorial order are major concerns, he will always be an important source of inspiration.

Bibliography

Arikha, Avigdor. Nicholas Poussin: “The Rape of the Sabines,” The Louvre Version. Houston, Tex.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983. A catalog of an exhibition focusing on the painting that Poussin executed for Cardinal Aloisio Omodei in the late 1630’s. Includes detailed investigations of subject matter and technique, and a discussion of Poussin’s art theory.

Blunt, Anthony. The Drawings of Poussin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. A general introduction to Poussin’s graphic work, written by a noted scholar of Baroque art who devoted the greater portion of his life to the study of Poussin.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Nicholas Poussin. 2 vols. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. Another of Blunt’s important studies of Poussin.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Paintings of Nicholas Poussin: Critical Catalogue. London: Phaidon Press, 1966. The standard catalog of Poussin’s work. Includes a complete survey of literature on the artist.

Friedlaender, Walter. Nicholas Poussin: A New Approach. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966. A general study providing an excellent introduction to Poussin’s work and art theory.

Hibbard, Howard, Poussin: The Holy Family on the Steps. London: Allen Lane, 1974. A detailed stylistic and iconographic investigation of a version of the Madonna on the Steps held in Washington, D.C. (there is another, and perhaps better, version in the Cleveland Museum of Art). Hibbard’s book is also an excellent introduction to a study of the artist.

McTighe, Sheila. Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McTighe offers new interpretations of some landscapes Poussin painted late in his career.

Marin, Louis. Sublime Poussin. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Collection of essays by Marin, an eminent scholar and art critic whose work was inspired by Poussin. Marin describes how to “read” some of Poussin’s paintings, pointing out some of their symbolism.

Olson, Todd P. Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Although Poussin lived for many years in Rome, Olson maintains the artist remained engaged with the culture and political transformation of France.

Poussin, Nicolas. Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné. Edited by Walter Friedlaender and Anthony Blunt. 5 vols. London: Warburg Institute, 1939-1974. The standard catalog of Poussin’s drawings.

Scott, Katie, and Genevieve Warwick, eds. Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Collection of essays about Poussin, including a discussion of his thoughts about painting, an examination of how Anthony Blunt interpreted Poussin’s work, and an appraisal of Poussin’s influence on subsequent artists.

Wright, Christopher. Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1985. A good, general book by an author who is primarily concerned with the artistic qualities of Poussin’s work. Contains excellent illustrations.